Week 8 Reading Notes

W3schools: CSS Tutorial

• Is CSS a markup language? Different than HTML? Under the HTML umbrella? It looks more confusing but the ability to create a more attractive end product. Which is easier to use while still creating an attractive website: HTML or CSS?
• So, what I’m getting so far is that HTML is your most basic markup language, and CSS works within HTML to provide easier formatting.
• Thinking about HTML and CSS as any other language, CSS provides the adjectives that define the HTML-created nouns (which makes sense since adjectives always precede nouns). However, the CSS doesn’t just describe the website’s text/image content, but also the website itself.
• Style sheets provide a sort of shortcut, which is great because writing the markup language for websites can take a long time. In the case of libraries, though, will a “webmaster” be in charge of the website, will an outside organization/company be in charge of the website, will it fall on the librarian, or will the library use a website program that doesn’t require HTML or CSS (like Wordpress)? It must differ from library to library, but I just wonder what is the case for most libraries (or based on the kinds of libraries—large academic vs. corporate vs. small public, etc.).
• Something to remember: there seem to be a few (many?) special cases for CSS markup language depending on the Internet browser (Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.).

W3: Starting with HTML + CSS

• I know this website encourages people to use a simple text editor, and I did use TextEdit to work on the HTML lab, but my partner suggests downloading and using Text Wrangler. It highlights your tags in a different color, which makes it easy to separate from your text, and he says that if you have issues in your HTML code, it will detect them for you.
• When using TextEdit, it’s important to save your file as “plain text” the very first time you save it. Very, very important. Otherwise you have issues with changing it to an html file.
• While the W3schools tutorials provide a plethora of tutorials, this source seems more useful for people who are just beginning to work with HTML and CSS.

W3: Cascading Style Sheets

• This appears to be a really detailed dissection of CSS—perhaps redundant with the other resources we have, but useful nonetheless.
• Perhaps this resource is outdated since the three browsers it mentions are Explorer, Navigator, and Opera. Now, I feel that more people use Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
• Important to note that when two rules are in competition, the more specific rule with override the more general one.